First, your roommates sound terrible and I totally empathize. My college roommates were so disgusting we were blacklisted from every professional cleaning service in town. I cleaned my room but their rooms and the common areas were absolutely disgusting and smelled putrid.

In any case, you said that you are hardpressed to understand why anyone would think that the lunch in the video is a waste of time since you were a "lazy bastard" and would have gained value from it. So I got a question for you: Would it be fair for other people that aren't lazy bastards to have to put up with that crap when they could be using their time more productively?

I know we're talking about small and petty things like cleaning up and lunch time. But these same themes can easily be applied to larger things like government regulation, organizational behavior, etc., where such rules would have much more significant ramifications than losing 20 minutes of a school day. Political ideologies are shaped by philosophical distinctions that can be apparent in the smallest of things like lunch time.

You're quick to mock my point of view because I used my lunch time differently than others. But that's exactly my point. It's not what I did or what you did during our free time. It's what you were ALLOWED to do. We had autonomy. Everyone had the potential to use their lunch times how they pleased, whether that meant doing absolutely nothing, or in my case, doing schoolwork or learning an instrument. But if we were to have such a super structured lunch for instance, neither of us would have a choice. Instead of using the time productively, I would be forced to do unnecessary chores that serve no purpose.

This is a debate between collectivism and individualism. Individualism fosters personal ambition and rewards those that set themselves apart from the rest. Collectivism emphasizes importance of unity and conformity. It's better for all of us to run at the slowest kid's pace than for people to run as fast as they can.

At least with individualism, if you fail, it's because of your own shortcomings. In your case, you not having self-discipline when you were younger is your fault, not anyone else's; whereas in collectivism, it's not that someone wouldn't be able to achieve more, it's that other people would go out of their way to stop him.

That's a pretty big philosophical and political distinction. I'm clearly a person that values individualism. I love my personal liberties and the freedom to succeed (or fail). Nothing is more soul-crushing than to stifle the high achiever because it's unfair he has more potential than everyone else.

I see the type of structure in the video to be an example of implementing the collectivist mindset into kids at a young age which will effect them and those around them for an entire lifetime. I'm against this type of stuff out of principle. That's why I'm against it. Deep down, I really couldn't give a shit about how some random school in Japan administers lunch.